Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Traders Brace for $15B Options Expiry as Bulls Eye $100,000

Bitcoin bulls are waiting ahead of a huge batch of Bitcoin options headed toward expiry.

Roughly $15 billion in options contracts are set to expire on Friday in the market’s quarterly settlement.

The September 25 contracts account for more than a third of all bitcoin options open interest on crypto derivatives platform Deribit.

A call option gives the trader the right, but not the obligation, to buy the underlying asset at a set price on a future date. A put option gives the right to sell.

The put-to-call ratio, a closely watched gauge comparing bets to sell against bets to buy, sits at 0.70. That means more traders are positioned for prices to rise.

The biggest piles of call options are stacked at strike prices of $85,000, $90,000, and $100,000.

Bitcoin’s price was recently trading at around $84,258, down 2% over the past day — and well above the so-called max pain level of $76,000.

Max pain is the price at which the largest number of options contracts would expire worthless, causing the most losses for option holders.

Bitcoin sits just below $85,000, where call options are most heavily concentrated, and traders are watching whether that level caps prices ahead of Friday’s expiry.

When a large batch of options nears expiry, crypto markets can become more volatile as traders decide whether to close their positions, roll them into later contracts, or let them lapse.

Past expiries have sometimes been followed by sharp price moves in either direction.

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